


From Hell

by Artemis (Citrine)



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes (1984 TV), Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dark, F/M, Jack the Ripper - Freeform, M/M, Slash themes, Unrequited Love, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-12
Updated: 2012-11-12
Packaged: 2017-11-18 13:20:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/561506
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Citrine/pseuds/Artemis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>London 1888:</p><p>The revelation had come upon not in rain and flame, but in a moment of quiet normality with tea steaming in the pot and the soft cry of a violin in the air. Baker Street, a day like countless others before it and this one quite different.  I was already engaged to my dearest Mary then and there could not have been a worse time for me to realise the truth of my own twisted nature. </p><p>I loved him.</p><p>And love which is meant to lift us up among the angels cast me down among the demons.  </p><p>If hell raged that night it raged at me.</p>
            </blockquote>





	From Hell

**Author's Note:**

> Rating is for the theme and for violence rather than for sexual content.

Tuesday 25th September 1888

Sherlock Holmes took up his pen. The cheap nib scratched on the flimsy paper and gouged through to the unvarnished table at which he wrote.  He was alone in a decaying Elizabethan mansion. Only the candle by which he composed his letter pieced the darkness.  A single flame split into two reflections; one a glint on a steel scalpel whilst the other flared upon a glass bottle in which a dark liquid congealed.

Holmes’ pen moved rapidly over the paper.

_Dear Boss,_

_I keep on hearing the police have caught me but they wont fix me just yet. I have laughed when they look so clever and talk about being on the right track_.

He scrawled a few more sentences _.  I saved some of the proper red stuff in a ginger beer bottle over the last job to write with but it went thick like glue and I cant use it._  

Holmes paused, grappling with the required illiteracy. _Keep this letter back till I do a bit more work, then give it out straight._   He added another ill-formed sentence and a final ironic _Good luck._

Holmes smiled grimly. The police would need the luck of Lucifer if they were to ever outwit him.  He turned the notepaper about and dashed off a postscript, just below the nom de plume he had invented for himself.

_Yours truly  
Jack the Ripper_

**

_From the diary of Dr John H. Watson MD_

Thursday 30th August 1888

Holmes came to my house that night, by the red glow of the dock fires that were visible over the grey rooftops of London and in the midst of the storm that cracked and roared.  Fire and tempest. Armageddon. The Ragnarok. And death. Death for my poor patient.

I was at the old clergyman’s bedside when storm and fire came upon us, but he had already sunk into the shadow of oblivion and not even the raging of the earth could draw him back to awareness. Perhaps it was as well, I would not have had him fear the fury of hell, for he was a suspicious, anxious man.  A vicar in the high church who had confessed his sins to his brethren before he drifted into coma.

I often thought that it must be a great burden to bear another’s sins.  

Patients have clung to my hand and insisted upon imparting deathbed confidences more times than I can recall. I have forgotten some of their shallow sins, while a few of their confessions will haunt me to my grave, such is the cruelty of man.

The solitude of waiting gives me an unwanted opportunity to dwell upon my own sins. I wandered over to the window, nailed shut against burglars, and pulled back the curtains. The silver lightening flashed across the room, but my poor patient did not stir.   He was blind to the storm as I wished that I might be blind to the deceit of my own heart.

The revelation had come upon not in rain and flame, but in a moment of quiet normality with tea steaming in the pot and the soft cry of a violin in the air. Baker Street, a day like countless others before it and this one quite different.  I was already engaged to my dearest Mary then and there could not have been a worse time for me to realise the truth of my own twisted nature.

I loved him.

And love which is meant to lift us up among the angels cast me down among the demons.  

If hell raged that night it raged at me.  

I had stood before god’s altar and taken my marriage vows knowing that they were smoke and falsehood.  My bride was not my love, but I could not in all conscience forsake her, nor could I confront Holmes with a realisation that must be abhorrent to him.  So I took a wife and tried my upmost to be a good husband to her, but our marriage seemed to be cursed from the start. 

My joy when Mary conceived was short lived, for she bled the child away and did not conceive again. I attributed it to grief over the lost babe when she grew thinner and paler. Yet there was a pulse of fear within me that would not be silenced and when I found her weeping and racked by pain all my worst nightmares became reality. 

We are told that the ways of god are mysterious and in the months which followed I could not understand why it was Mary and not I who suffered for my sin. My suffering was in my silence and the shameful knowledge that if his nature had been as inverted as my own her illness would have driven me into Holmes’ embrace.

My patient passed quietly from his veil of tears in the early hours of the morning. There was no one to mourn him save his old housekeeper.  The sky was still scarlet with fire when I left the vicarage with a heavy heart.  He had been a very old man and sick beyond all medical aid, but it was never easy to lose a patient. 

When I arrived home Mary was waiting up for me.  She needed her sleep and I chided her gently for not going to bed, but Mary declared that she had been too disturbed to sleep. The pain in her back and the roll of the thunder had kept her awake even before Holmes hammered at our door in the midnight hour.  He had been angry and agitated.  Holmes had demanded to know my whereabouts and when she told him truthfully that she did not know my patient’s address he had slammed out in a fury.

His disgraceful behaviour raised my temper against him and I held fast to my indignation, grateful for a reason to resent him. I gave Mary a little laudanum and tucked her into bed.  Then I went down to my study where I poured myself a brandy and poked the embers of the fire into life.  I vowed that I would go to Baker Street that very afternoon to demand both an explanation and an apology. Holmes had no right to speak to my wife in such a fashion.  Yet I could not help but wonder at the reason for his outburst. I prayed that the answer did not lie in the cocaine bottle, but I feared that it might.

I rested my head against the chair back with a bitter sigh.  Mary was dying. I was in love with another man, a man who was probably descending into the hell of addiction.  Could things possibly get any worse?  

**

**BRUTAL MURDER IN WHITECHAPEL**

A murder of the most brutal kind was committed in the neighbourhood of Whitechapel in the early hours of yesterday morning, but by whom and with what motive is at present a complete mystery. At a quarter to four o'clock Police constable Neill, 97 J, when in Buck's row, Whitechapel, came upon the body of a woman lying on a part of the footway, and on stooping to raise her up, in the belief that she was intoxicated, he discovered that her throat was cut almost from ear to ear.

_Daily News, 1 st September 1888_

**

_From the diary of Dr John H. Watson MD_

Saturday 8th September 1888

I called upon Holmes after luncheon, only to find that he had not yet risen from his bed, a circumstance which discomforted me, so I withdrew to our old sitting room while he bathed and shaved. In my absence it had grown untidier than ever. A sheath of papers impaled on an ivory handled knife stood in the centre of the mantelpiece. Every surface was covered in a confusion of objects both strange and familiar. When I attempted to negotiate my way to the windows, so that I might open the curtains to the afternoon sun, glass snapped beneath my foot.  I knew what it was before I bent to pick up the shattered vial. The jagged edge spotted blood upon my hand and when I tasted the clear bead of fluid that clung to the sharp side of the vial I discovered that his drug of choice was morphine, not cocaine.

“They say that it subdues all agonies, but regrettably I have found that to be untrue,” said Holmes quietly.

He stood in the doorway, framed in the shifting interplay of light and shade.  As was often the case I was instantly divided against myself; his drug use alarmed and infuriated me, but I was also desperately worried about him.  Every time I visited he was thinner and the shadows under his eyes had grown darker. I thought despairingly of my pale Mary and I knew that I could not bear to lose both of them.

“What agonies?” I asked, although I dreaded his answer. “Are you ill, Holmes?”

“No, Watson, not as you mean it.” He sounded tired. “It isn’t my body which is ailing, but I am heartsick and weary.”  Holmes closed the door and leant against its solid wooden surface. “How are you faring, my friend?”

I wanted to say that I was wretched without him, but of course I did not say so. “I’m well enough. It’s your health that concerns me.”

“Do not trouble yourself on my account.” He patted my shoulder. “There is nothing wrong with me that requires a physician’s care.”

“There will be if you keep on injecting yourself with this poison.” I hurled the broken vial into the litter bin. “Doubtless you will be able to obtain more easily enough.”

His smile was infinitely sad.  “Temptation hath a music for all ears,” Holmes quoted, which answered by question not at all. “I did not expect to see you today, Watson.”

“I did not expect to find you still abed at this hour.”

“I was late upon the tiles last night and did not get into the early hours.” He sat Indian fashion on the sofa, with his long legs curled up and his old mouse coloured dressing gown wrapped around him. “I’d hardly been home an hour when the police came banging on my door, seeking to whisk me off to Whitechapel.”

“I knew that they would come straight to you,” I said. “It is all one hears being talked about in the street and the late editions are full of nothing else but last night’s murder.”

“And now there are three, Martha Tabram, Polly Nichols and Annie Chapman,” said Holmes. He closed his eyes for a moment. “Dark Annie. Dying Annie, who met another doom in Hanbury Street. Pray tell me, what do you make of it all, Watson?”

“Precious little, Holmes. According to the reports in the papers the Chapman woman’s lungs and brain were severely diseased, probably the  result of venereal disease although they did not say so directly. Death from such an infection is an ugly, long drawn out process. It grieves me to say it, but perhaps her killer did her a kindness.”

“Do you truly think so?” Holmes fixed me with that piercing stare of his. “No, do not answer that.”

“Did you find out anything of any account in Whitechapel?” I cleared a heap of documents off  my old armchair and sat down upon it.

“I did not go to Whitechapel.”

“Why ever not?” I burst out. “The whole city has been plunged into chaos by these dreadful murders, even respectable women go in fear of their lives, and yet you tell me that you didn’t even go to the crime scene.”

“It is the work of a lunatic and there is nothing that I can deduce from insanity.” He was angry, engulfed in one of those sudden rages that I knew so well. “I have told the police that I cannot, will not, help them.”

“You must!” I was every bit as furious as he was. “People are relying on you, Holmes. If the press reports are to be believed the police haven’t the faintest idea how to catch the Whitechapel murderer.”

“That is not my concern!” Holmes shouted. He sighed. “Tell me, Watson, what would you have me do?”

“My dear fellow, I would have do what you do so well, solve this mystery, bring the culprit to justice and let the people of London rest easy in their beds once again.”

Holmes uncurled himself from his chair. He came to me and he placed his hands upon my shoulders. “If I do as you ask I fear that the results may be catastrophic.”  He laid his index finger across my lips before I could take issue with him and then, to my eternal amazement, he drew me into his embrace.

**

_You cannot go on like this. I fear that my recourse must be to the authorities._

_No, you must not! Give me time, just a little more time. I swear that I can control this…darkness._

**

_From the diary of Dr John H. Watson MD_

Friday 28th September 1888

I have been much at Baker Street these past three weeks. Holmes asked for my assistance with two cases, neither of which seemed worthy of his talents, but one of them took us up to windswept Northumbria for several days. I was glad of the clean, pure air and the chance to wean him away from this new dark mania for morphine. He was not cured of his addiction when we returned to London, but I have at least persuaded him to curtail his intake. 

Holmes seemed pleased that the case had gone well and he had even accepted the buttonhole, a red rose coupled with a maidenhair fern, that his grateful client had pressed upon him. We parted with a handshake at Kings Cross  and as I watched his tall figure disappear into the milling crowds I felt an overwhelming sense of lost. A fierce longing for the dear old days when we would have gone home together to our cosy rooms and Mrs Hudson’s wholesome cooking.  Then I felt a greater sorrow and a shame for the secret that I kept from the world. 

The secret I kept from Mary who greeted me with her sweet smile and never a word of reproach for my absence. She was as white as the silk cushions upon which she lay and when I gathered her up into my arms she winced and whispered that the pain was dagger sharp.  My poor, dear girl was utterly exhausted and I carried her up to bed with my heart breaking. I gave her the very morphine I had denied him. She slept and I kept vigil at her bedside until I slipped into slumber and dreamt of Holmes.

**

From the diary of Dr John H. Watson MD

_Saturday 29 th September 1888_

Mary is still grievously sick, far too ill to rise from her bed. I have given her a draft of opium  Whilst she sleeps I will slip out to see how Holmes fares.

_Sunday 30 th September 1888_

The horror is upon me.

Holmes was not there when I got home and Mrs Hudson could only say that he had gone out into the rain that wept over the city.  I went to Inspector Lestrade who told me that Holmes had been prevailed upon to descend into the abyss of the East End where terror still haunted the streets.  There had been no further outrages since the death of Annie Chapman, but now the monster had a name.

He was Jack. Jack the  Ripper.

A letter had been received at the Associated News Agency three days before bearing that signature. It had whipped up a frenzy of fear in the narrow streets of Spitalfields and Whitechapel _._ There was to be no respite, no mercy for the unfortunates who plied their trade in the shadow of death.

_I am down on whores and I shant quit ripping them till I do get buckled. Grand work the last job was. I gave the lady no time to squeal. How can they catch me now. I love my work and want to start again._

The police were floundering, criticised by press and public alike they had turned once again to Holmes. This time he had not turned them away. And where he went I would follow, down into the pit, down into hell.

**

From the diary of Dr John H. Watson MD

_Tuesday 2 nd October 1888_

There were too many semi-derelict terraces crushed together cheek-by-jowl with slaughterhouses and workhouses, with narrow alleys running between them like smog clogged arteries, stinking of filth and poverty.

I enquired for him among the costermongers in the tawdry market and in many of the spit and sawdust public houses that glittered on every corner, but no one had seen Holmes. The women, raddled by hardship and rank with disease, who still plied their trade on those degraded streets had not seen him either.  A few shied fearfully away from me, but most had the boldness of desperation; drunken, dirty prostitutes who promised me paradise for the price of a doss house bed.  

One demanded that I buy her a glass of gin, although the alcohol that reeked on her breath suggested that she had already drunk her fill that night.  I would have left her in the gutter, but I recalled how Holmes always declared that public houses were the very best places to gather intelligence. So I let her lead me to the saloon bar where I brought sharp, potent gin for us both.

Holmes had left his buttonhole dying on the mantelpiece. I had pinned his blood red rose to my own lapel. The prostitute tried to wheedle it from me, but she was not worthy. Not of anything that he had ever touched. Nevertheless I gave it up to the pathetic creature and before I could avoid it she rewarded with a stinking, broken-toothed kiss.  It was more than I could endure and with neither sight nor word of him I led her out into the night. A flood of biblical proportions would be required to wash that foul place clean and the rain which had fallen earlier had only churned up evil smelling sewage.  And the noise was ever ceaseless, the howl of a tug boat on the Thames, the iron heartbeat of a foundry. Her rough English accented with her mother tongue enticing me into a dark courtyard.  Such a conniving liar she was, I told her plainly as we stood against the wall, “you would say anything except your prayers.”

She should have said them that night, the last night of her miserable life.

As we stepped into the blackness of the old courtyard I thought that I saw a match light flare behind us, but it was gone in a second.

She went down with scarcely a murmur, scarcely a struggle, blood spraying onto the dark wall. I bent over her and heard footsteps on the cobbles. Enraged beyond reason I fled into the night.

**

_I lost him in the maze of alleyways and rookeries between Berner Street and Mitre Square.  By the time I found him it was too late to prevent…Oh, dear god._

_Drink this, carefully now, you’re spilling it. Do try to stop shaking, my boy._

_I shall be all right in a moment._

_Shall you indeed?  This is destroying you and these abominations cannot be allowed to continue.  I will go to Chief Inspector Abberline today._

_Wait, I beg you! I believe – I have to believe - that I can still subdue the monster within him._

**

**THE WHITECHAPEL HORRORS.**  
  


Two more ghastly tragedies were, yesterday, added to the appalling list of crimes with which the East-end of London has been associated during the last few months; and there is every reason to believe that the whole series is the work of one man. The first of the two murders was committed in a yard turning out of Berner-street…

 

Having been disturbed in his first attempt, yesterday morning, the murderer seems to have made his way towards the City, and to have met another "unfortunate," whom he induced to go with him to Mitre-square, a secluded spot, lying off Aldgate, and principally occupied by warehouses. He took her to the south-western corner of the square, and there cut her throat, quite in his horribly regulative way, and then proceeded to disembowel her.

_Evening News, London, 1 st October 1888_

**

From the diary of Dr John H. Watson MD

_Friday 26 th October 1888_

Mary is failing fast and I know that my long absences weigh heavily upon her, but Holmes keeps me close by him now. He suggested that I send her to a sanatorium. Holmes insisted that she would be safer there. I chuckled and asked why my Mary should not be perfectly safe at home, but I would have sent her to darkest Africa if he had asked me to do so.  She wept in the irritating way of women and said that she did not wish to leave our home. I stood firm and made it clear that she must abide by my wishes. Then in a fit of spite she declared that her banishment, as she called it, was all Holmes’ doing. She even dared to suggest that his feelings for me were improper. 

I was disappointed in her.

Once Mary was settled in the sanatorium I travelled out to Sydenham every Friday to visit her.  She clung to my hand and asked for news of home.  I curbed my impatience and reassured her that all was well. It would only have upset her to know that I had dismissed the staff, shut up the house and returned to Baker Street.

Holmes was always waiting for me when I arrived home.  My step always quickened upon the stair in anticipation of seeing him, as if it were days rather than mere hours since we had parted.  I knew that I should not love him as I did, that I would be cast down into the fires of hell on the day of judgment, but I could not desist. He was as necessary to me as air and I fretted over him. Holmes was too pale, too thin and too much dependent upon that that dratted morphine.

“This stuff will be the ruin of you,” I told him once, “but I shall do all that I can to wean you from its evil influence.”

How he laughed at that, a hysterical  hollow laugh which made me fear that he might be becoming completely unhinged.

**

_How is Watson? Has he shown any signs of mania of late?_

_None, he has been much calmer recently despite his wife’s impending death._

**

From the diary of Dr John H. Watson MD

_Thursday 8th November 1888_

Armageddon. The Ragnarok

Mary.

Mary with blood on her mouth, cursing my name and his. A haemorrhage from her corrupted lungs that spewed over the white hospital sheets and killed her in minutes.

The doctor offered me his condolences and a brandy.  He explained that her sudden demise had been unexpected, that he had thought that she would live for several weeks yet, perhaps even into the new year. As I appeared to be distraught he was most anxious that I should not leave unaccompanied, but I would not wait for him to send a telegram to Holmes.

I wanted to be away from that antiseptic mausoleum and his insistence infuriated me. After a sharp exchange of words I marched out into the winter sunshine. The next train back to town was almost empty and I got a first class cartridge to myself. I was in no mood to talk to anyone, not even Holmes. My yearning was for space and air, not that I would find either among the press of  unwashed humanity in smoke ridden London.

Night spread its cloak over the city and the lamps were being lit on the Embankment when I passed through the West End on my way to Whitechapel.

Her name was Mary and she was a whore.

I wandered the dark streets of Whitechapel and Spitalfields. The whores were two a penny, many of them were indistinguishable from my previous kills, ugly, dirty, middle-aged alcoholics and I was looking for something else that night, something fresher. She was not exactly what I sought, but it was long after midnight when I met her on the Commercial Road. The Irish whore was as drunken as the rest, but she was twenty years younger than the others, with fair hair and blue eyes she reminded me of my own dead Mary. She held my arm and stumbled over the cobbles singing a few bars of a sad, sentimental song.  

We stopped for a moment on the corner of Dorset Street. She put her hand upon my shoulder and kissed my cheek, a mockery of innocence tarnished by a whore’s fake smile. "All right, my dear,” she said. “Come along. You will be comfortable.”

I put my arm around her waist and she kissed me again. We stepped into the shadows of Millar’s Court, into the shabby unlit darkness. The whore took my hand and led me the squalid room with its broken, rag-stuffed window that she called home. Thirteen Millar’s Court. Unlucky thirteen. Unlucky for her.

I cut her throat.

And then I set about my work. I was halfway done before Holmes found me.

He stood just inside that bug-ridden room. Holmes was so drained of all colour that I feared for a moment that he might faint. I laid down my scalpel and hastened to his side. I was only a couple of paces away from him when he bent over and vomited onto the bare floorboards. 

“You shouldn’t have come out on such a wet night if you are unwell,” I scolded him gently.

When I placed my hand lightly on his bowed back he recoiled as if burnt by vitriol. “Oh dear god…Watson…”

So precious was he to me that I could not bear the look of anguish upon his handsome face. There was no reason for him to worry, no reason for him to fear. The whore was dead and we were quite safe. I took his face in my hands and kissed his mouth. Holmes either resisted nor yielded, but then all this was as new to him as it was me. My hands left imprints of bloody crimson on his white skin and by the deceiving light of the fire I imagined that I saw terror in his grey eyes. Holmes swayed on his feet and I wished that I could ask him to sit down, but every surface was strewn with body parts.

My memory fragments.

We stood beside a rusty water pump and Holmes used his wet handkerchief to wipe the blood off my face. 

The old dock, St Mary Overys, St Marys over-the-water. Mary. Mary.

I sat at a desk in a dusty room. There was an inkwell before me and a bottle of what looked like old, dried blood.  Holmes stood by the diamond leaded window. There were no other chairs, no other furnishings at all and only a single candle to lighten the pre-dawn gloom.

The Stranger’s Room at the Diogenes Club.

They argued most vehemently, Holmes and his brother, Mycroft. Their words hammered in my skull, pieces of a broken puzzle that I could not quite master.

_You must bow to the inevitable. He is beyond your help, beyond all salvation._

_What would you have me do, Mycroft? Would you have me hand him over to the police, to the gallows or the insane asylum?_

“Yes, I would,” Mycroft replied.

“You forget that I am implicated,” said Holmes.

“That is precisely why I have been to see the Home Secretary and the Prime Minister.  After some persuasion I convinced them to offer a free pardon to anyone who brings the murderer to justice, no matter how implicated they may be, for heaven’s sake take it, Sherlock.”

“How can I?  You know that I have lied, dissembled and manufactured false evidence. My arrogance, my…faith in him has cost those wretched women their lives.”

I wished that they would be quiet.  There was a dark nag of pain behind my eyes and I was weary, so very weary.  My fingers plucked nervously at the rug Holmes had tucked around me as if I were a sick old man. I feared that I had gone too far that night, that my conduct in the slums of Whitechapel had alienated him from me forever.

I had been too obvious in my affections. How could he interpret a kiss upon the lips as anything other than evidence of an unnatural passion?  I flinched to remember how greensick he had looked, but at least he had not recoiled from me in horror. 

“Holmes, I’m sorry…” My words stumbled into silence. I did not wish to speak of my adoration before his brother.

Mycroft caught at his arm to restrain him, but Holmes pulled away and came to my side. He knelt on the rug next to my armchair.

“What are you sorry for, old friend? What have you done?”

I did not want to say. “When I…” I touched his lips fleetingly with a fingertip. Tears filled his eyes, Oh, sweet god, I had made him weep.

“Is there anything else that you are sorry for?” he asked me gently.

His expression told me that there ought to be something, but I could not think what it might be. Was it my  marriage that he resented?  An absurd thought occurred to me, surely he did not disapprove of my activities in the East End?  That seemed most unlikely, given Holmes’ aversion to women how could he possibly ever object to the slaughter of a few diseased whores?

“I don’t know that there is,” I told him.

The razor edged silence in the room told me that I had given him the wrong answer, but I had no other to give. Holmes closed his eyes as if in pain, then he patted my knee kindly and rose to his feet . “Don’t worry about it, Watson.”

They argued again, bitter, angry words that tore through my throbbing head.

_You can’t save him, you can only save yourself._

_What salvation is there for me when I am far more responsible for these atrocities than poor Watson, who truly believes that he has done nothing reprehensible?_

**

_From the diary of Dr John H. Watson MD_

Wednesday 9th January 1889

England is far behind us.  The train rattles and smokes through long Alpine tunnels and over high viaducts between snow covered mountains.  I am more than content to be in Holmes company and my only regret is that he still injects himself with morphine every evening. I want to wean him from it, but I am exhausted, plagued by terrible nightmares from which I wake howling in terror. Holmes is always very patient with me, as gentle as one might with a child or a lunatic.

**

Saturday 19th January 1889

The waters are fathomless, but the tragic course of events can be easily discerned.

My brother stood on the balcony of the room that they shared at the Englischer Hof, with the white mountains before him and the sunrise at his back. He put the needle down on the table and it scarred the rosewood with a translucent tear of morphine. I have searched his luggage and found no more morphine concealed among his belongings. It was the last, the very last, of his supply and the fact that he made no attempt to replenish it tells me all that I need to know.

Nevertheless I have spoken to Mr Steiler, the hotelier, who has told me that they breakfasted together before they went up to the raging falls of Reichenbach.

They did not return.

I have retraced their path to the mighty waterfall.  With its primeval roar in my ears I have touched the earth where they stood, one behind the other with scarcely a feather’s breadth between them. They stayed there long enough for their footprints to sink deeply into the mud. 

Down they went, down to the steep edge of the chasm and there they turned about so that they faced one another on the precipice. I do not know what transpired between them. Nor do I know if it was Sherlock’s strength alone that cast them into the abyss or if Watson went willing to his doom. 

Any attempt at recovering the bodies was absolutely hopeless, and there, deep down in that dreadful cauldron of swirling water and seething foam, will lie for all time the most dangerous criminal and the foremost champion of the law of their generation.

Mycroft Holmes

**Author's Note:**

> The Dear Boss letter: This is generally thought to be a hoax, probably written by a journalist. It was the first time that the non de plume ‘Jack the Ripper’ was ever used, so if it was a hoax it was a very successful one.
> 
> The thunderstorm and the dock fires: Not poetic licence on my part, they both really took place on the night that Polly Nicholls was murdered.
> 
> Martha Tabram: An East End prostitute who was murdered on the 7th August 1888, about three weeks before Polly Nicholls. At the time she was widely regarded as being the first (if not the second) of the Ripper’s victims. 
> 
> The Final Problem: Yes, the last lines of this tale are Arthur Conan Doyle’s with a twist put upon them that I am well aware that he never intended.


End file.
